The Nanny

It's generally good sport to poke fun at commenters at virtually any major "news" site, just because of the sheer numbers and the law of averages, but in this case the peanut gallery is so on-the-money it's not even funny.

One can watch HBO's excellent 4-part doc The Weight of the Nation, and be subjected to a veritable barrage of relevant facts and stats, and still wonder what the hell Bloomberg is thinking. Yes, Americans' chronically dysfunctional relationship with food. Yes, the relentless mechanization of agriculture, leading to the inexorable power of King Corn, and the ubiquity of high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) in everything from hamburger buns to soft drinks, has led a generation or so of Americans down the path of obesity and adult-onset diabetes.

Something can and should be done, it's just that Bloomberg's proposal is maybe the single most counterproductive idea imaginable. For one, the proposal is for a city, in a state which is relatively low n the list of, shall we say, "fat states", places typically in the top quintile or quartile of obesity rates. If the governor of Mississippi was proposing this, it might mean something. Mayor of NYC, not so much. So there's not really an overwhelming need in this particular instance.

Not to mention that there's nothing to stop anyone from buying two, or three or five, 16-oz. soft drinks and combining them on their own. Or getting them at a bodega, as opposed to a restaurant or movie theater.

So there's no demonstrable need, and it's way too easy to circumvent. And those are just the pragmatic arguments. Philosophically, it would be much better to make an economic incentive or disincentive effort, to either encourage "good" behavior or discourage "bad" behavior.

This is one thing that the HBO doc, in all its well-meaning assertions, also fails to take into account. People know that fast food isn't good for them, they know that 64-oz. barrels of soda aren't good for them, just like they know that drinking alcohol and smoking aren't good for them. The idea that "if only they knew" is just ludicrous. They know, I promise you they know.

Now, this doesn't mean that the problem should be completely disregarded, or left to the vicissitudes of a hopelessly debauched "free" market, where subsidized HFCS finds its way into every little thing, and adversely impacts Americans' collective health. There is no debating that obesity and its consequences can, do, and will account for a significant chunk of costs -- and certainly the vast majority of completely preventable costs -- incurred in an already brutal health-care system.

Part of the beauty of a free society is the quotidian acknowledgement that everyone gets to go to hell in their own way. To adopt the usual libertarian argument, as long as it doesn't pick your pocket or break your arm, you shouldn't concern yourself with other peoples' bad habits. And to the extent that those habits end up taxing the health-care system at the expense of everyone else, yeah, tax the hell out of 'em.

But to propose an outright ban, knowing full well that it can't possibly work, or change anything, just serve as some sort of bullshit bien pensant showpiece -- especially when it comes from a little tool who engineered himself an extra term in the first place, a finance weasel bound and determined to leech every bit of color and character out of his city by Disneyfying it to death -- not only deserves to be dumped in a heartbeat, it actually undermines more coherently thought-out efforts in this area.

Raising Arizona

You can't help but appreciate when life imitates art. This is precisely whence comes the saying that stupid people shouldn't breed.

In Your Facebook

At some point in the near future, hopefully, I'll be gearing up my own little e-business on the side, since it appears to be the only way to do more than eke one's way through life in our postmodern paradise. And with such a venture will come the requisite social marketing presence, of which Facebook is still currently the primary mode of disseminating marketing piffle.

So it's not that I necessarily wanted the vaunted Facebook IPO to fail so epically, it's just that none of the numbers made any sense. No one seemed able to explain where the $100bn market cap came from (after being estimated at $45bn a little over a year ago), for a company with almost no discernible revenue model.

Someone should put Jamie Dimon on the case; he seems pretty adept at falling into buckets of shit and not splashing a drop.

Sperm Donor

Of course, extreme cases such as this jism-spraying retard should not be seen as being indicative of anything, except maybe to restate the time-honored maxim that stupid people really shouldn't breed -- or at least they should know when to fucking stop.

However, I think it's fair and reasonable to say that no court should strike any deal or cut any breaks whatsoever for this dipshit until he presents a receipt attesting to having gotten a vasectomy, maybe two just to be sure. But really, no deals or breaks should be had at all -- it's a surefire bet that every single one of Desmond Hatchett's thirty kids is receiving some form of government assistance, and that Hatchett's minimum-ass wages need to be garnished until every last cent is repaid. Fuck this gaping asshole.

Extra kudos, btw, to the commenters who use Hatchett's idiocy to complain about blacks, women, Democrats, Obama, and the "welfare state" in general. On that last count at least, there's a small amount of truth, in that more creative ways should be found to either incentivize good behavior, or disincentivize stupid behavior. Either pay this dipshit a couple hundred dollars to do the right thing and get clipped already, or just garnish every goddamned dime he makes until the taxpayers' investment in his progeny is recouped.

Providing a safety net for those genuinely in need should not mean enabling useless bastards like Desmond Hatchett to fuck everything that moves and force everyone else to pay for it.

SEO Tips and Tricks

So it seems that out there on these weird wild intartubez, there is a particularly auspicious asshole in Greenville, SC by name of George Tierney, whose Twitter MO seems to be harassing Sandra Fluke, calling her a "cunt" and asking her "when [she will] shut [her] god damn dick sucker". Fair enough; apparently Ms. Fluke's testimony a few months back pinched a nerve or several, and Tierney feels free to utilize his sacred First Amendment rights to, I dunno, challenge Ted Nugent to a contest to see who can be the biggest fucking jackass.

So. TBogg has duly noted Tierney's attempt to be this generation's Phil Donahue/Alan Alda male-feminist type, and of course Tierney promptly orders Mr. Bogg and his site managers not only to, um, cease and desist reprinting Tierney's own tweets verbatim, but, ah, to stop affecting Teh Google with these mischaracterizations. How someone can claim to be misrepresented by not only quotes, but screen shots, should be an interesting tale.

This is and always has been your garden-variety movementarian conservtard in a nutshell, folks -- smarmy, self-satisfied, quick to lob a nasty epithet, and even quicker to get all butt-hurt and chest-puffy when someone has the nerve to, you know, quote them.

Tierney should see a lawyer, that way someone can at long last explain to him how the fuckin' law works. Jesus, you can't make this crap up, parody has long been a thin substitute for reality.

Semantics

If one wishes to characterize Romney's prep-school hijinks as "bullying", hey, good luck with that. Last time I checked, a couple people holding someone down while another person shears the victim with a pair of scissors, like a trussed-up sheep, is not a "prank", it's called assault and battery.

From shearing queer kids to making a buck off of gutting American companies and putting American workers in the unemployment line, and pocketing the difference for himself. No, no behavioral pattern there at all.

State of Failure

Gosh, it's just too bad California isn't a Wall Street bank. Then we would be considered "too big to fail", and bailed out forthwith, and given a nice fat bonus for our troubles. Instead we're just a state that contains 1 in 8 Americans, and gets 77 cents backs for every federal tax dollar we pay in tribute to the high lords in DC. Ho hum.

Remember, friends 'n' neighbors, AIG alone got $180 billion in the bailouts. Even half of our $16 bn deficit would help out hugely. Apparently it's better to let us die on the vine.

Sports Medicine

It's somewhat disingenuous for a professional sportwriter to seriously put forth the following sentence:

I’m kind of confused as to why former NFL linebacker Junior Seau’s suicide by gunshot to the chest got so much attention recently when safety Dave Duerson’s suicide by gunshot to the chest a little more than a year ago did not.

Really? Not trying to be an asshole, but there should be zero confusion here. The easy answer is that Duerson was a very good player who played ten seasons, and retired almost twenty years before his suicide, while Seau was a once-in-a-generation whirlwind who played twenty seasons, the last of which was 2009. I mean, come on.

The more pernicious answer, and the one the writer should just throw out there and say, is that the NFL does not want to talk about this shit, not at all. They didn't want to talk about Duerson, nor Andre Waters, nor Ray Easterling, nor Justin Strzelczyk, nor any of the other players who ended their lives violently. Nor all the players who, while still presumably lucid and non-violent, had their bodies and brains ravaged by the sport. The league has a clear vested interest in avoiding that conversation. It's just that with a recently retired world-class talent like Seau, a guy who literally changed the nature of the position he played, it couldn't be ignored.

The NFL is a huge cash cow, riding a tremendous wave of success, and with millions of passionate fans (including, of course, yours truly) around the world. I remember talking a beat-up L.A. Raiders cap with me to Europe in '91, and having complete strangers coming up to me in England, France, Austria, Liechtenstein. Dig that if you will, friends 'n' neighbors -- Raiders fans in freakin' Liechtenstein. So it's understandable that the suits running the league have zero interest in making fans feel guilty about paying to watch grown men destroy their bodies for our amusement.

But it's there all the same, and it's a shame, just like the NCAA's slave system of reaping massive profits from students who play for free and pretty much have to win a lottery ticket to have a successful pro career, is a disgrace. As fans, we have to decide on what's right.

Porn Again

Not only is it hi-larious that America's porniest city is in the shadow of Disney World, but that well over half of the top 20 cities are in deep red states, right through the bible belt.

As always, draw your own conclusions.

Pray the Gay Away, Part 2: Homogeddon

Count me, I guess, as partially chastened by Obama's endorsement of same-sex marriage, at long bloody last. It would seem more sincere had it occurred, say, the day before, instead of the day after, North Carolina's vote on the topic, or without sending out Biden and Duncan as stalking horses.

Still, the move is ultimately the right thing to do, no matter how politically expedient, and it has the added bonus of causing the disingenuous rightards to flip out. Makes the whole thing that much more entertaining.

Speaking of which, did you know that Bristol Palin has a blog? It's true! (NB: As much as I disdain Politico, there is no goddamned way I'm linking to Bristol Palin's blog, even if it's almost certainly ghostwritten.

Bristol Palin thinks it’s laughable that President Barack Obama’s children influenced his decision to support same-sex marriage.

Mm-hmm. As opposed to, say, the laughability of a person known precisely three (3) things -- having a dingbat mother, being an unwed teenage mother, and being featured on a played-out cheeseball dancing show -- trotting out her unsolicited opinion, and getting it covered by Serious Media. What, no Today show gig? Whatever; obviously it's far less interesting what Miss Thang "thinks" about the issue at hand (or any issue), than the notion that anyone thinks her opinion would be interesting.

This issue of same-sex marriage is fascinating to me for two reasons: One is that some of the greatest resistance to it has come from black evangelical churches, and history will equate this movement almost precisely with the civil rights and anti-miscegenation movements of the '60s. There is a clear parallel between how gays are treated now with how blacks were treated then, in scope at least, if not literal degree of violence. But the point is that both groups were legislatively oppressed at their respective points in time, with the endorsement of many fine upstanding god-botherers. At some point, these black churches, congregations, and clergymen will have to come to terms with this, understand their hypocrisy, and get their shit right. In the meantime, shame on them.

The second reason is that this issue represents something of a sea change in electoral politics, in that it transcends the usual tropes of "rational self-interest". Even opponents of the issue have to concede that the pro-con numbers are fairly close, no matter how one tries to cherry-pick this or that poll. The nation is fairly evenly split, with most legit polls giving it slightly to the pro side. Yet no one would contend that that means that the same proportion of Americans are gay.

Look, I'll use myself as an anecdotal example. I'm a straight white male, and I don't know many gay (as far as I know) people, and none that are closely related to me (again, afaik). I have no skin in the game; this issue literally does not affect me in the slightest, either way. But I happen to think that fairness and justice and common decency are important, and that the current laws are unnecessary and pointless. That's all. And I believe that a substantial chunk of supporters are in the same boat -- no real skin in the game, but believing in the right thing all the same.

And historically that seems a rare thing, people getting engaged in an issue that does not directly concern or affect them. Abortion may be another in that realm where many participants on either side have little or no direct experience with the issue, beyond this or that hortatory film or rally.

It's also a pragmatic issue, perhaps that more than anything, in the end -- any person for whom this issue factors even into the top hundred of social and economic ills facing this country, I'm sorry, but they have a screw loose. Funny how the folks who persist in claiming that the nation should be run "like a business" are almost always the first to clamor over this nonsensical guff.

Qu'ils Mangent de la Brioche

Is there anyone following the ongoing economic debacle that would seriously contest Taibbi's contention here? Not only is it no secret that any austerity measures will come solely out of the hides of the peons, they scarcely bother to conceal it anymore.

And why should they? They barely bothered to hide the model that ruptured the economy in the first place, the "we fuck it up, you rebuild it and give us all fat bonuses" racket they dumped on us a few years back. As many folks (including, of course, yours truly) wrote at the time, the bailout completely disincentivized them from avoiding the same sort of bad behavior down the road.

It ain't rocket science. If you catch your kid poaching cookies from the jar and lying about it, you don't beat him, but you also don't just whistle a happy tune and bake another few dozen cookies to replace the ones he took. Except in this case, Junior was stealing cookies from every house in the neighborhood, and all you did was just replace the cookies to placate the neighbors, and not even talk to Junior about his bad behavior. So again, why wouldn't he continue to do what he was doing?

I dunno. It is weird and counterintuitive to watch how economic issues don't unfold here, how they seem largely inert, or maybe they're just being ignored, because no one wants to read about how someone gets their job sent to Shenzhen, then loses their house on the subprime ARM adjustment, then either murder-suicides his family or ends up in a tent city scavenging cans for cheap vodka. One would hope that if enough people were exposed to the magnitude of the human damage that a rapacious financial has instigated and perpetuated, they might rise up, get on their hind legs and be men when it counted most.

The main thing to keep in mind is that there is enough to go around, but in a plutonomy, the players at the table never know when -- or even how-- to say "when". It takes a certain type of person to take money that they didn't even earn -- that they inherited, or stole, or coerced, or simply got lucky on -- and presume a sense of entitlement, a mission to simply hoard and push the peasants around.

Keep taking their shit, until you realize you really don't have to.

Pray the Gay Away

I'd like to go on record and wholeheartedly thank the fine voters of Nawth Caraliney for their valiant stand against those awful hommaseckshuls and their pernicious ways. Clearly this whole "marriage" thing is just a sneaky attempt to gull us fine upstanding members of polite society into, I dunno, leaving our virgin butt-cheeks unprotected.

Seriously (and I said the same thing when my own fine progressive state voted the same way), what the fuck is wrong with these people? The nation and the planet are on the verge of truly catastrophic circumstances, on a lot of fronts. It is inexplicable that this is even on the top 100 of any serious person's concerns.

Extra kudos to the Obamanauts for scrambling on this one like Randall Cunningham. To use the standard Lucy with the football analogy does a disservice to poor Lucy; rather than simply yanking the football and cackling with glee, it's more like they substitute a lead-filled pumpkin, but continue to insist that, nope, that there's a god's-honest gin-yew-whine football, I tell yew whut.

You have to love the faithful defenders in the comments there -- if Obama proposed tomorrow that, say, payroll taxes be increased on workers by 20%, and Planned Parenthood be completely defunded of federal dollars, they would rise as one and stomp and huff that Romney would raise the tax by 50% and repeal Roe outright with a single swing of his mighty sword. Let the N8r b8ing begin in 5...4...3...2...

I dunno. Ask Dick Lugar about the value of centrism, of dickless incrementalism, of letting yourself be pushed around, time and again, by some fat, crazy slob, losing the respect of the rest of the playground, when all it would take to win that respect back would to fucking pimp-slap his stupid ass down already.

Then again, maybe not -- NC certainly proved today that dumb 'n' ign'int is alive and well, in generous portions, for no good reason at all. Perhaps this is really the way 'murkins want it, dumb and dysfunctional, drafting foolish and mean and useless initiatives to make closeted god-botherers feel better about who-knows-what, while the rest of it all goes up in smoke.

But this is no way to run a mature democracy, not one that hopes to survive. These are the actions of drowning souls, desperately pulling down whatever is within reach.

Money Talks

Another reminder, as if you needed one, heading into yet another interminable election season, that Saint Barry O is not your friend. The most charitable thing you can say about the man is that he seriously seems to think that punting on first down is a valid negotiation tactic.

Not to insinuate that maybe Obama's energies are better spent elsewhere than on griefing potheads, but sweet Jebus, time and again he insists on letting the animals who already nuked the economic system once prepare to do it all over again. This JOBS Act, with its stupid (even by gubmint standards) recursive acronym, is being billed as a boon to "startups"; what it will more likely do is create more Instagram IPOs. Because it's been a good long time since we had a Pets.com-led tech bubble, n'est-ce pas?

Come June, odds are that the administration's sole domestic "accomplishment", the fatally-flawed-from-inception Affordable Care Act, a pork-laden industry-written boondoggle that should never have gotten as far as it did in the first place, will be flipped by the Supreme Court, thanks to the self-serving antics of Swingin' Tony Kennedy, who apparently never met a fence he couldn't ride until splinters shoot out of his ass. So that leaves killing bin Laden, which is enough reason to give Obama the nod again, but only just.

Again, it is a fine thing to nobly take it upon oneself to "change the system from within", as it were, to accept and even embrace the inherent perfidies of our flawed system, and "vote" accordingly, invoking the usual pronunciamentos of serving as the final bulwark of reason against the barbarian asshole horde.

Of course, this is twaddle, and we all know it, even the folks who truck in such tendentious jabber. It is Chomsky's evil of two lessers, over and over and over again, an endless, perpetual Groundhog Day campaign cycle culminating in a same-as-it-ever-was denouement. Some will tell themselves and each other -- and ankle-bite any doubting Thomases with their bien pensant horseshit -- that once Barry gets his second term, why, that's when the real change will begin, just you watch, pally.

Friends 'n' neighbors, cash in your IRAs and 401(k)s and such like, and bet heavy on this here prognostication: Obama will win (suitably close for popular consumption and media horse-race profiteering), but nothing will change. Not a goddamn thing. The SEC will not suddenly grow teeth, Obama will not have a change of heart and bring Paul Volcker back into the fold. Not one Goldman Sachs swindler will ever be frog-marched off to a cell next to Bernie Madoff. Not one industry or CEO will so much as pay an extra percentage point in taxes for outsourcing hundreds of thousands of American jobs to Asian sweatshops, and pocketing the difference. Not one Democrat will be truly emboldened by an Obama victory. They'll make the requisite mouth noises, they always do. But they won't actually commit to anything. They are already bought and sold to the highest bidder, and they are always thinking of the next election.

That's not to say you shouldn't at least participate in the collective charade, cast your pebble into the entropic void, if for no other reason than that you have convinced yourself of the simple nobility of that act, that it is the price one must pay if one is to be permitted to complain. Go for it. Just keep in mind that so long as the benchmark remains so low as "just be less of a toxic asshole than Mitt Romney", then the Democrats will do the bare minimum to meet that benchmark and nothing more. They'll work just hard enough to keep from getting fired.

And then they'll turn right back around and do what they've been doing, because to try to force them to do anything even a bit different or better gets characterized as Savonarola-level apostasy. The popular notion in recent years was that the Republicans treated the Democrats the way Lucy treated Charlie Brown when she held (and inevitably pulled) the football. I submit that while the essence of the metaphor is entirely correct, the correct application of it is in how both parties treat any and all Americans who happen to not be lucky enough to reside within the donor class.

But I'm sure that this quadrennial tilt at gutless incrementalism will be much more effective than the last one, or the one before that.